The Men’s Hockey Club announced via Instagram on Thursday they would be reinstated in September as a student-run organization.

As a student-run organization, the team will not have the support from the university that they did in the past. The program was previously run by university employees but will now be managed by students.

The university suspended the team for competing during the 2022-23 academic year, according to a press release released last year, based on an investigation by the Office of Student Conduct. The team was found to be in violation of the Student Code of Conduct due to hazing.

“[Iowa State University] said that they would no longer offer the support that they had in the past,” said Stuart Pearson, club president and electrical and computer engineering graduate student. “There are a number of avenues we can take to get the support and infrastructure that we need.”

Pearson said that ideally, this change would have no negative impact on the team.

“We are looking to build out all that infrastructure so that in the next few years, looking from the outside, no one would be able to tell a difference,” Pearson said.

The team has completed all requirements set by the university to return to competition.

“We were reinstated officially back in…the very end of May or beginning of June, but there were a lot of roadblocks that we still had to clear to be able to have some semblance of a season this year,” Pearson said.

Pearson said the team’s hard work over the summer has helped clear some of these obstacles in their way. One of their biggest roadblocks was getting games scheduled. Games in their league are planned up to two years in advance, making it difficult for them to find teams to schedule games with.

“If you’d have asked me back in February if we were to have a season this year, I wouldn’t have been super optimistic, but now I’m definitely more cautiously optimistic than I was,” Pearson said.